Nadhim Zahawi MP

The publication of RBS's first quarter results last week, which saw the bank
move from a £1.5bn loss to an £826m profit, has re-opened the debate about what
to do with the Government's 81% stake.

What's clear is that those inside RBS believe that the bank will soon be ready
to return to privatised ownership. Both Stephen Hester, the bank's CEO and Sir
Philip Hampton, RBS's chairman, commented as such this week. What isn't clear
though is exactly how the government will choose to do it, and when.

One option is to simply sell the shares at their current value, taking a loss
on the 407p a share book price, but seeing that loss offset by the benefit of
returning RBS to the private sector. Although were that to be done today then,
at the current share price of around 288p, a loss of
about £13bn to the country's permanent debt would be transferred to the national debt.

There have been many mechanisms proposed for such a sell-off, from a sale to
institutional investors to a 'Tell Sid' style public offering at a discounted
price. But as both approaches would see the government make a loss, neither see
the public gain from their investment in the firm.

We all know that there's a
significant shortage of housing in this country, a problem that, if current
evidence is anything to go by, is only going to get worse in the future.

The latest figures from the
Cambridge Centre of Housing and Planning Research show that we should be
building 270,000 new homes a year to meet demand, yet housing starts in England
in 2011-12 were just 105,090. Perhaps more worryingly, planning approvals for
the year ending June 2012 were for just 50,233 dwellings.

But over and above the fact
that it's a good idea for everyone to have somewhere to live, house building is
also good for the economy. The latest figures available from the ONS Blue Book
showed that in 2010 each new private sector dwelling built added £129,197 to
GDP.

Nadhim Zahawi is the Member of Parliament for Stratford-upon-Avon. Follow Nadhim on Twitter.

Before the crash in 2008 the banks offered politicians a choice: we could have free markets, or we could have effective regulation, we couldn’t have both. The current debate about the Government’s response to Leveson rests on an equally false dichotomy: statutory regulation on the one hand, or the hard-won liberties of Fleet Street on the other.

For newspaper editors and proprietors this has been a great debating tactic. It’s thrown up a smokescreen of high principle in front of the real debate, which is about whether we continue with a failed system of self-regulation, or bring in an independent regulator which the public can trust to do its job.

I was born in a country where every media outlet existed to glorify the regime, no British politician is more grateful for a free press than I. When I was asked to sit on the Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions my gut instinct was to oppose statutory regulation. But having heard the evidence, it’s clear to me that the PCC lacked either the impartiality or the clout to uphold a professional code of ethics.

MPs know better than anyone that when a major scandal has occurred under a period of self-regulation, the way to restore public trust is not to propose more self-regulation. Yet this is what the industry has done. A free press is not the same as an unaccountable press, any more than an elected government is beyond Parliamentary scrutiny. We need an independent regulator to hold editors and proprietors to account.

Nadhim Zahawi is the Member of Parliament for Stratford-upon-Avon. Follow Nadhim on Twitter.

The last week was by any account a heavy news agenda, further details on Jimmy Saville, the threat to Ash Trees and Hurricane Sandy were contrasted with the more positive news of positive growth figures.

With the news agenda so full, it's perhaps no surprise that a decision by the Secretary of State into a planning appeal in Stratford Upon Avon gained little attention. Yet it's a decision that has national significance and one that will see 800 houses and a new road built on land adjacent to Anne Hathaway's cottage. For those that don't know Anne Hathaway's cottage is the property where Shakespeare courted his wife and that now holds his famous "second best bed" and is a central part of the Shakespeare story, which is of course in turn an integral part of this country's heritage and cultural legacy to the world.

The background to this is important. In 1998 the West Midlands regional planning guidance was published which required Stratford District Council's locally developed plan to be reviewed and updated. In 2005 this plan went through a public review where a Planning Inspector told the Council that even though they had chosen not to include it, the site in Shottery had to be used for future housing development. Despite their reservations the Labour Government's centralised approach to planning at the time meant that Councillors had no choice but to place this sensitive area in the Local Plan and mark it for eventual development.

The IMF’s World Economic Update, released yesterday, makes sober reading for the world economy, stating that “The Global recovery is threatened by intensifying strains in the euro area and fragilities elsewhere”. The organisation has downgraded global growth forecasts by three quarters of a percentage point and even downgraded growth in developing and emerging economies. Particularly badly hit is the Eurozone with Germany's growth put at 0.3%, France’s at 0.2 and Italy and Spain both in negative territory at -2.2% and -1.7%.

The IMF is entirely clear about the cause, specifically that “growth in most other advanced economies is also lower, mainly due to adverse spillovers from the Euro area”. So any claim that the report is blaming poor domestic demand, or too tight an austerity programme in the UK is entirely untrue. If anything, the IMF highlights the dangers of failing to deal with a deficit, pointing to Japan and the USA when they say “Another downside risk arises from insufficient progress in developing medium-term fiscal consolidation plans in the United States and Japan”, continuing “As long as public debt levels are projected to rise over the medium term, and in the absence of well defined and credible fiscal consolidation strategies, there is the possibility of turmoil in global bond and currency markets.”

I am strongly in favour of evidence-based strategy. Before I became a politician I built a business based around that idea, and it was the approach I also took to how we ran the company. If a manager had an idea that was going to “transform the business”, I’d always ask them to show me the evidence first. The problem with evidence, particularly statistical evidence, is that you can nearly always find a way to make it fit your own argument. Evidence-based policy making is therefore fraught with difficulties and complications.

Take immigration. For years the last Labour government, spurred on by reports and economic studies, opened our borders. These studies and reports, many of them researched and written by Tony Blair’s own Performance and Innovation Unit, found “There is little evidence that native workers are harmed by migration”, and that “The broader fiscal impact is likely to be positive.”

Of course it was a mere coincidence that the findings of those studies just happened to be in line with the thinking of the government of the day. Last week we had an excellent example of how statistics can be used to back up your own world view. Two reports on immigration and its effects on the UK, one from the independent Migration Advisory Committee and another from a think-tank, the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR).

Nadhim Zahawi is the Kurdish-British and Conservative Member of Parliament for Stratford-upon-Avon.

Sadly, the prospects of peaceful reform in Syria are being drowned in blood by a vile regime that is desperately clinging on to the privileges of a minority whilst stirring up tensions between ethnic and confessional identities to continue to divide and rule.

The opposition is bravely facing murderous security forces which execute the wounded if they seek treatment in hospitals.

Opposition figures claim that it unites Muslims and Christians, Sunni and Shia as well as the Alawites which have formed the backbone of the Assad regime. All that is to the good. But there is a large missing ingredient - the Syrian Kurds, who make up 12-15% of the Syrian population. It may be higher, as there has been no census for nearly 50 years.

Revolutions usually contain the seeds of their own success or degeneration in the way they unite disparate forces to confront and overcome tyranny.

The absence of the Kurds from this effort to cool sectarian tensions isn't some arcane point, but a powerful pointer to history repeating itself unless the popular revolution accepts their rights and role in the new Syria.

I recently met a representative committee of the Syrian Kurdish Community in Britain.

Nadhim Zahawi is the member of Parliament for Stratford on Avon, a member of the Business, Innovation and Skills Select Committee and co-author of the book Masters of Nothing: How the crash will happen again unless we understand human nature.

We all know the previous government left us a record deficit, and an economy heavily dependent on the financial services sector. The situation was so bad that by 2007, financial services and the City were responsible for 27.5% of all corporation tax receipts.

So when the Masters of the Universe became the Masters of Nothing, and the previous government discovered that Boom and Bust couldn’t be abolished, was it any surprise that tax revenues reduced so dramatically? Should they really be surprised that with an unbalanced economy, built on top of a growing structural deficit, they created the largest deficit in the G7?

I’m delighted to see the Prime Minister putting his support behind Start-up Britain. This new campaign for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs is being headed by some of Britain’s biggest and most successful businesses. It includes not only the involvement of the co-founder of my own business, Stephan Shakespeare of YouGov, and of my own alumni UCL, but also of businesses such as Google, Microsoft, Blackberry, O2, Axa and many others.

Since coming to power the government has been clear that this must be an enterprise led recovery that creates new jobs in the private sector. However it’s easy to forget, as the previous government did, that government can’t create jobs, it can only be a catalyst. Government is instead about creating the correct environment for the private sector to grow, for entrepreneurs to innovate and for jobs to be created.

As someone who has been through the start-up process myself, who began a technology business in a shed, with an internet connection, a computer, and a telephone, I know how difficult it can be to strike out on your own. How difficult it is to take those first steps with your own idea, and to take the decision to risk it all. I’m sure though that the support being offered for free by StartUp Britain, services and benefits worth £1,500 to every start-up, would have benefited us, and will smooth the process for those who want to take this momentous, but vital step.

I have always been a keen believer in the fact that it is the small and new businesses that will help deliver the growth needed to fix Labour’s economic legacy. Yes, supporting big business is important, but it’s how we help thousands more people to take the steps to entrepreneurship that really matters.

As the Prime Minister said today “There are thousands of people out there who are entrepreneurs, but they just don’t know it yet.” Just last week I met some of those people when I spoke to UCL graduates and I was encouraged to see so many thinking about starting-up on their own. For the future StartUp Britain won’t just help people like them as they take their first steps, but will also help them to make that choice in the first place, through programmes such as StartUp Summer and other new initiatives.

So I, like the Prime Minister, fully support StartUp Britain and can’t wait to see its work begin to bear fruit with a new generation of entrepreneurs and great British businesses.

Nadhim Zahawi is MP for Stratford on Avon and a member of the Business Innovation and Skills Select Committee. This is an edited version of remarks he gave at Monday's 'Going for Growth' conference, hosted by ConservativeIntelligence.

The government needs to do something to create growth appears to be the overwhelmingly clear message coming from all quarters. But exactly what that “something” needs to be and how that fits with what the government is already doing, doesn’t appear to be quite so obvious.

“We need a growth strategy” says one group, “the Chancellor needs to lay out what the economy will look like in the future” says another, “the BIS department is failing to deliver a growth agenda” claims Her Majesty’s opposition, but again no one seems able to say what this should be and exactly where the government is failing.

Why? Because growth isn’t something that happens because you implement a policy, it’s as much about creating confidence for businesses as anything else. If business has no confidence then it’s not likely to invest to grow or to take on new employees. Therefore creating growth has to fundamentally be about how we create an environment in which businesses are confident enough to grow. In reality it’s as much about where we leave businesses alone as where we as government intervene.

So here are my suggestions to Ministers for growth - you could call them my 3Rs:

RegulationSpeak to any businessman or woman and they will tell you that over regulation stifles growth. This is why one of the first policies implemented by the Coalition was one-in, one-out on business regulation and a review of all business regulations across all departments.

Nadhim Zahawi is MP for Stratford on Avon and has just introduced a ten minute rule bill in the Commons to make St George's Day and St David's Day bank holidays in England and Wales respectively.

Last month the Prime Minister declared that there would be a Bank Holiday to celebrate the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton and I am delighted that as a nation we will have the opportunity to celebrate this momentous occasion on 29th April 2011. It reminded me of an issue that I hold dear to my heart and that is the celebration of St George's Day and St David’s Day’s with Bank Holidays in England and Wales respectively.

This is a subject that means a lot to me and to many of my constituents in Stratford on Avon. Unlike our neighbours in Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, England and Wales do not currently celebrate our Saints Days as Bank Holidays; this is something that I want to change. I hope to replace next year’s Royal Wedding Bank Holiday in perpetuity to celebrate our two countries' Patron Saints.

We all know Saint George as the famous dragon slayer, whose bravery led to the freeing of a town from a vicious dragon and thus led them in their subsequent conversion to Christianity. But did you know that he was himself an immigrant to this country? Saint George is widely believed to have been born in Turkey and served in the Roman army. St David is remembered today for his unifying effect and the strengthening of Christianity in Wales as much as for his miracles and close connection to nature.

So we all know about our Patron Saints, but why is it important to celebrate them?